Motherland (2023) by Alexander Mihalkovich and Hanna Badziaka

Author

Jakob Wunderwald

Abstract

In this review of the documentary [Radzima] / Motherland (Alexander Mihalkovich and Hanna Badziaka, 2023), Jakob Wunderwald shows how a film about hazing in the Belarusian army, and about a mother fighting for justice after her son's death, grows into a statement on state violence in Belarusian society. The Belarusian uprising of August 2020 overturns the world of the film and the lives of its young protagonists.

Keywords

Belarus; Ukraine; army; state violence; protest; dedovshchina; documentary cinema; 2020 Belarus presidential elections; military; justice; court; solidarity; war; refugees.

[Radzima] / Motherland (2023, Sweden, Ukraine, Norway), a full-length documentary film by two Belarusian directors, Alexander Mihalkovich (Aliaksandr Mikhalkovich) and Hanna Badziaka – the former an experienced filmmaker, the latter a veteran journalist for the independent Belsat TV station – confronts forms of state violence that run deep in Belarusian society. On the surface, it is a film about dedovshchina (hazing), the systemic abuse many novice army recruits suffer at the hands of senior recruits and officers, but through that prism it addresses different societal processes that culminated in the Belarusian mass protests after the falsified 2020 presidential elections and their violent suppression: the inability of the justice system to deliver justice, the crushed hopes of a whole generation of young people, and the yearning to break out of long-established patterns of submission. Therefore, Radzima serves as a far-reaching portrait of the deep, multi-layered crisis that Belarusian society has been experiencing over decades of authoritarian dictatorship and of its protagonists’ ultimate inability to transcend it.

The film interweaves two main storylines. The first follows Sviatlana Korzhych, a woman from a village in the Pinsk region, whose son Aliaksandr was found hanged in the Pechy training base near Barysaŭ, where he had been serving since May 2017, a few months into the compulsory military service required of most Belarusian men.. Aliaksandr’s death – not the only one on the base – was officially ruled a suicide, although its circumstances pointed towards foul play. A significant public debate in Belarus had followed at the time, but to little avail. In the film, we bear witness to Sviatlana’s desperate attempts at getting justice for her son as well as to the connections she makes with relatives of other victims of dedovshchina in the Belarusian army.

The other storyline takes viewers to the city: there, a group of twentysomethings is enjoying life, involved in underground culture – raves, late-hour hangouts, smoking – until one of them, Nikita, is called upon to do his military service. Shortly after the start of his service, mass protests break out across Belarus, pitting the friend group on opposite sides of the historic moment: most of them take to the streets, hoping for the fall of the regime, while Nikita is part of the military force that quashes the demonstrations.

The film was conceptualised and filmed over a long period of time under the adverse conditions of a historical rupture: filming began in 2018, a year after Aliaksandr Korzhych’s death, and lasted well into the post-2020 period. The protests were not expected by the directors; they forced themselves into the movie by necessity: as Hanna Badziaka tells in an interview with Zerkalo, the filmmakers had underestimated the possibility of such a historic event, and could not foresee the strong effects it would have on their protagonists’ fates (see Tarnalitskiĭ 2023). The movie had to be finished in emigration, since its directors, like many Belarusians, were forced to flee the country after the protests. Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, became their new home base, and it is where they were working on the film when Russia’s full-scale invasion, partially carried out from Belarusian territories, began. Shots from the Ukrainian-Polish border, depicting the second great flight movement the Belarusians were forced to become part of, form a coda to the movie. After its completion in 2023, the movie was shown at several festivals and received a number of awards: among them the Dox:Award prize at the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen and the FIPRESCI Award at the goEast Film Festival (2023) in Wiesbaden. The film also swept the 2026 Red Heather Belarusian Film Critic Awards with wins in Best Documentary Feature Film, Best Director, and Cinematographer.

The film opens with a shot of railroad tracks, evoking the travels its heroine Sviatlana has to undertake from her village home to go to the military base, to meetings with other victims’ relatives, and to court. The screen cuts to black, to English-language explanations for the “non-translatable” (Dolin 2024) term dedovshchina. Another cut follows, this time to a large group of people walking through a cityscape in a common direction. One cannot help but think of the 2020 protests here – but this is not the case: the people are walking to a military event where young recruits swear their oath between displays of tanks and other military gear.

This is the closest the film ever gets to the actual army. Later on, and necessarily so due to the mechanisms of an authoritarian state without real possibilities for media inquiry into its inner workings, the Belarusian military becomes a kind of black box: nobody inside will really talk, there is no possibility of actually finding out what goes on inside – only dead, battered bodies get out of there. This is where Sviatlana’s story begins. The camera follows her to the court proceedings, to the cemetery where she tries to get a priest to consecrate her son’s grave, and to meetings with other mothers of dedovshchina victims.

We see those women talk, try to make sense of what happened, and discuss experiences of powerlessness in confrontation with the state apparatus. We see them cry. In a particularly harrowing sequence, Sviatlana discusses her gruelling story with a young boy’s mother she met on the train by chance. Sviatlana asks the mother directly if she would want to send her son to an army practising such a degree of internal violence. The mother is obviously shocked – but when asked if something should be done so her own son will not have to endure similar experiences, she just answers that there will always be violence in the military: “No matter how much you fight, it’s impossible to win.”

And it is true: in one of the final scenes of the film, we see another mother read from the letter she got from the prosecutor’s office, stating that no crime has been committed and therefore that no further judicial proceedings will follow. The only real “proof” for what happens inside the army is delivered via voice-over: it consists of letters the film’s director Mihalkovich wrote to his mother during his own military service – and in them he describes how the military slowly turned him into a willing participant in the violent rituals. Thereby, the transgenerational nature of the violence becomes palpable – as well as the impossibility of escaping it on an individual level, even if you are a well-educated, sensitive young man.

The movie takes its viewers through the interiors of its protagonists’ homes, thereby creating a map of the different social milieus its heroes inhabit, and of the different ways in which those milieus are subject to state repression. There is Sviatlana’s well-kept village home, where she tends to chickens, cats, and other animals, and where photographs of her dead son lie around everywhere, a constant reminder of the child taken from that peaceful place. There is the upper-class city home where Nikita and his father live, ostensibly filled with signs of economic well-being. In that interior, Nikita and his father discuss the son’s upcoming time in the army – and the older man cannot let go of his deeply ingrained position towards the military: the “sharp-edged military order” will “straighten out” the young man’s psyche, and, in the end, something “good and average” (“khoroshee-srednee” in Russian) will come out. The old man, although clearly loving his son, cannot break with a traditional view picturing the military as a school of life where proper men are made.

Lastly, there are the interiors of urban hipster flats, full of old furniture, cigarette smoke, and half-full bottles of liquor and lemonade, where Nikita and his friends hold loving, profanity-laced conversations, discussing their fears about military service, their life perspectives, and later, the protests. It is in these scenes that the film feels like a requiem for a whole generation: the progressive youth born out of the ‘soft liberalisation’ of the 2010s in Belarus, which adopted and radicalised the lifestyle of metropolitan hipsters around the world, organising raves and performances, keeping pace with international fashion trends, living life as a constant game of make-believe – of making oneself believe that one lives in a ‘normal’ country, that all possibilities are open, that one can just do what Millennials do around the world.

This world breaks down in several ways in the film: Nikita is conscripted, and when the protests are about to break out, his friends call him. They ask what he would do, should his commander order him to shoot the protesters – and he cannot tell them that he would not do that, out of fear of being killed himself. When the film later shows the famous image of a young policeman standing in front of the Minsk Government House, his face hidden behind a balaclava, that image gains a new double meaning: perhaps this figure is simply another Nikita. The line separating a young activist from becoming one of the regime’s henchmen might be vanishingly thin in a society where death is always a possible penalty for disobedience.

The film’s audio track mirrors different layers of Belarusian society: there is the quiet of the village where only birds sing, and other animals clamour. There is the city with techno and rap music, the noisy soundscape of a house party, and finally, the explosions during the protests. Between that, there are moments of silence in which the protagonists are lost for words. Sometimes, officialdom breaks in via sound: television reports on the court proceedings or broadcasts of a speech Alexander Lukashenka gives at the traditional army parade on Victory Day. Soft electronic music is only used as a background for the voice-over readings from Mihalkovich’s letters, marking them as meditations on what has not been overcome yet, on what an older generation unwillingly has handed on to their children: violence and forced submission.

The final scenes of the film show the queues at the Ukrainian-Polish border after the Russian full-scale invasion, combined with on-screen text about the fates of its protagonists: Sviatlana has abandoned her fight for justice in the starkly authoritarian climate of post-2020 Belarus; all the young people have left Belarus, Nikita being the last, in 2022. None of what they had fought for – freedom, justice on a personal and on a societal level, a ‘normal’ life – has been achieved. Most fundamentally, echoing the experiences of so many Belarusians after 2020, Radzima is a film about losing one’s motherland.

Jakob Wunderwald
University of Potsdam
jakob.wunderwald@uni-potsdam.de

Bibliography

Dolin, Anton. 2024. “Rodina – dokumentalʹnyĭ filʹm o dedovshchine v Belarusi. Sosluzhivtsy ubivaiut syna glavnoĭ geroini – i ona nachinaet sobstvennoe rassledovanie”. Meduza. https://meduza.io/feature/2024/02/12/rodina-dokumentalnyy-film-o-dedovschine-v-belarusi. February 12.

Tarnalitskiĭ, Taras. 2023. “Vlast’, nasilie i dedovshchina. Kak sozdavalsia fil’m ‘Radzіma’, kotoryĭ pobezhdaet na kinofestivaliakh i nominirovan na ‘evropeĭskiĭ Oskar’”. Zerkalo. https://news.zerkalo.io/cellar/53384.html. November 8.

Filmography

Mihalkovich, Alexander and Hanna Badziaka. 2023. [Radzima] / Motherland. Folk Film / Sisyfos Film Production / Voka Films.

Bio

Jakob Wunderwald is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of Potsdam’s Institute for Slavic Studies. He holds an M.A. in Slavic Studies from the Humboldt University of Berlin. His doctoral research explores concepts of ‘truth’ in post–World War II Belarusian Soviet literature, focusing on the works of Vasil Bykau, Uladzimir Karatkevich, and Ivan Shami͡akin. His writing has been published in a variety of venues, including Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Topos, and dekoder. Outside of academia, he works as a translator of modern and contemporary literature from Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian.

Suggested Citation

Wunderwald, Jakob. 2026. “Motherland (2023) by Alexander Mihalkovich and Hanna Badziaka”. Belarusian Cinema and the Protests of 2020: Cinema in Exile (ed. Volha Isakava and Sasha Razor). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.427.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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